October 2013: What are you reading?

I am about to finish the truly amazing Kristin Lavransdatter after which I will start on The Bell for the group read. On audio I am close to finishing Disgrace. Can't wait to be done with this one.

Still working on A Void.

Two big books on the go at the moment Cecilia (Fanny Burney) and Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon). Both over 1000 pages, and both proving enjoyable to date.

I just finished The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I think is the last Holmes book on the 1001 list. I've been reading all the Holmes books anyhow, so I will continue with his adventures even if it's no longer "1001-worthy". :)

I'm working my way through a bunch of shorter, owned works this month (running out of room on the to-read shelves). I've finished To Each his Own and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Next up will be Hawksmoor or The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman.

I just started Middlemarch, which will take me some weeks to finish I think, and am working my way through A Dance to the Music of Time, now part 3.

Recently started To Kill a Mockingbird. Amazingly, it is the first time I've read it. I've seen the movie so many times, I thought I didn't need to read the book. I'm discovering how stupid that was.

Also, trying to finish Female Quixote before I have to return it to the library next week. I seem to have stalled out on it, but I've come so far that I don't want to simply quit.

I read Animal's People from the 2010 list, I really enjoyed it as there was so much going on in the book. I am planning to read La Regenta, I have been given a version for students of Spanish, and a couple more volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time (I have now read books 1-7).

Finally finished both Disgrace and Kristen Lavransdatter, reviews on my thread. Now I'm moving on to The Bell for the group read.

Halfway through reading The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric. Mixed feelings so far. Maybe I need to finish it before I make a final judgement.

Still picking through Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. Won't finish it this month, I'm sure, and will soon pick up some other 1001 book.

I just finished Reveries of a solitary walker (what a snooze-fest!), and I've received The History of Love from the library. I'm really hoping for a change of pace.

Infinite Jest still, but hoping to finish it in the next week or so.

>10 nlgeorge: I'm also reading The Bridge on the Drina, but I'm only about 80 pages in at this point.

In addition to that, I started Billiards at Half-Past Nine yesterday and it is going super-fast. Enjoying it a lot.

October is always a bad reading month for me. It's already the 8th and I am still working (only 25% in) on Caleb Williams. Started Murdoch's The Bell this morning and will start the audio of the 10th Dance to the Music of Time volume with the wonderful title Books Do Furnish a Room.

Finished with the clever A Void yesterday and starting The Bell for the group read next.

I've been working my way through Terry Pratchett books via the library. When all the family medical issues hit crazy levels, I tend to go toward easy, light reads. Either stuff like Pratchetts, or cozy-style mysteries.

Finished The Bell and started Silas Marner.

My house has just gone on the market and so my time for reading is rapidly dwlindling! I have a feeling October will be my slowest reading month of the year at this rate!

Even so, I am not far from finishing Grapes of Wrath which currently has a firm boot wedged in the door of the 5* club, we'll see if it can squeeze it's way in by the end.

My real paper book of the moment is Books Do Furnish a Room and will most lilkely be followed by The Bell

I just finished Under the Net by Iris Murdoch and will start The Bell shortly. I'm also reading Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.

I'm on to Fear and Trembling by Amelie Nothomb.

Finished Fear and Trembling, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for a short, easy, entertaining 1001 book.

Finished The Bell, Caleb Williams by William Godwin, The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy (short) and this month's Powell.

I'm still concentrating on the free older classics, next up is Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz, a 1785 "psychological novel". Doesn't exactly sound like fun.
And I started a long Italian book, I Vicerè by Federico De Roberto.

I finished The Year of the Hare and The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman and have been slogging through Hawksmoor for more than a week.

I'm reading There but for the which I think I'll finish today or tomorrow and Suite Francaise. This is the time of year when I realize that I need to get moving if I want to get to the goal I set for the year!

Having finished The Bell, I'm now getting ready to start Runaway Horses, which is the second book in The Sea of Fertility.

On audio I am listening to Cannery Row which is very unsatisfying. I like a book with more of a plot. It's the first Steinbeck that I've read since about 9th grade and I am underwhelmed.

I'm listening to God Don't Like Ugly on audiobook right now. It's very good. Earlier this month, I read Easter Island and listened to the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, 13 reasons why, the memory keeper's daughter and travels with charley. I'm reading Snow Country right now.

Midnight in Sicily .........Peter Robb
Will have to go see now.Always reckoned on it being one of the worlds shit holes. So much for ignorant prejudice.

27: Don't judge Steinbeck too much by Cannery Row - I like it, but it's far from his best. East of Eden is one of my all-time favorite books, and Grapes of Wrath is pretty fantastic as well. (Though opinions seem to be divided on that one...)

In the past month, I've been working mostly on newer books (Colum McCann's TransAtlantic, Philipp Meyer's The Son, and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being - all of which might show up in a 2015 re-listing!) while slowly whittling away at Don Quixote. It's a truly funny book, especially if you've read any chivalric literature, but it's also 900 pages long with many repetitive plots. Still, I like it - I'm just taking it slowly.

I've finished The Bridge on the Drina but not managed to put up a review yet. It was good, overall, but was more like a succession of short stories than a novel. Now I'm halfway through Dead Babies, which is definitely a change in mood, style, content, everything you can imagine.

I am back with A Dance to the Music of Time, volume 8.

My pedestrian reading month continues but I have now finally finished Books do Furnish A Room (which was brilliant!) and also finished Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I'm now starting The Bell, finally, for the group read, and am a quarter of the way through Rabbit, Run on the Kindle.

Finished The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which I didn't much like, but I'm still glad I read it just for its cultural significance. I never would have considered reading it if not for the 1001 list.

I'm reading If this is a man and started getting misty-eyed at page 3.

I'm reading Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro since she just won the Nobel prize for literature. I'm also finishing up Suite Francaise which I highly recommend.

I've been to Munich over the weekend and bought a stack of new 1,001 books at the big Hugendubel store. Already finished the first one: Uwe Timm's Die Entdeckung der Currywurst/ the invention of curried sausage. I guess it's on the list for its title. Not bad at all, but almost unknown in Germany. I had been looking for it for years now and was glad I finally found it. To celebrate that I made it my #300, yay! :-)

#299 was a 1700s German classic: Henry von Ofterdingen by Novalis. This book is SO much incomplete that I wondered why it was put onto the list at all. It's short and it is clearly only the very beginning of a gigantic work, just a glimpse of what the author had in mind.

So many here have been recommending The Postman always rings twice lately that I started this one last night. I am already halfway through it and enjoying it immensely.

I got through another 5% of "Sodom" (now around 30%) and as expected it's getting worse and worse. I want it to be over...

I finished Runaway Horses today... (the second installment in The Sea of Fertility tetralogy.) I didn't quite like it as much as the first book, but it was pretty good. I'm still excited about reading the rest of the series.

Next up for me will be Good Morning, Midnight.

I'm still plugging away at Midnight's Children and have decided Rushdie and I are not great friends. I'm also reading King Solomon's Mines- fun adventure story!

Getting married and buying a house has put a damper on my reading. I can't wait until my life is more boring ;)

I'm reading Joseph Andrews, another hilarious novel by Henry Fielding.

I am now back with some longer books which I will take into November. I took up Don Quixote again after a long break, now combining an old paper copy, an online version and an audio book. 900 pages to go... Some chapters are real fun, but with all those stand-alone episodes it's easy to lose concentration.

Then I am now seriously reading Nana by Émile Zola which I started months ago and never got past the first chapter.

No progress on I Viceré and the sickening "Sodom", but among my books from Munich there was also Anais Nin's Delta of Venus in German. It's either a terrible translation (also full of bad typos) or a very bad book or both. So far (70 pages in) I'd rate it with no more than 1.5 stars.

And last not least there's Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist on my quest to get through as many "extra-old" classics as possible this year. So far this one's quite good.

Having finished Good Morning, Midnight, I'll be starting either Some Prefer Nettles or The Woman in White, whichever arrives first from the library. :)

#41, I did Don Quixote on audiobooks and I just loved it that way. It's as if it was meant to be read aloud. What translation are you reading? I had the Smollett translation, which was wonderful.
I wanted to read a big book too, because I have already read next month's Group Read and thought that if I started now, I could get through something substantial by the end of November. And I wanted something with a good, strong plot because on audio I'm listening to Cannery Row which is just a series of sketches. So I thought "Russian literature! It has plots and is long!" and I settled on Oblomov. I am sorry to say that this was a mistake. It is indeed a long book but it seems to have no plot. In fact, a plotless life seems to be the whole point of the book.

#43: It's John Ormsby's translation, narrated by Roy McMillan. I decided after listening to some samples, and I understood this narrator best. I am reading the German papercopy/online book along with it. The English sounds fantastic, but I don't always get everything, it's sometimes a bit difficult with these older classics in English, there are too many words I never heard before.

I loved Cannery Row, but can't imagine it as an audio book. Maybe it's just a feeling, but Steinbeck's language is beautiful in print for "eye reading" and I never felt the need to read passages aloud as I did with other authors (like Jim Crace's Harvest which is not on the list).
The "Dance to the Music of Time" series is another example I love on paper and can't process in audio form at all.

I've finished with Some Prefer Nettles, but wasn't particularly wowed by it. Hoping for better with my next one, which will be War with the Newts.

Following in the footsteps of a couple of others I've picked up A Void to round the month off.

Rather than try fit another Kindle book into the month I've also decided to get a sneaky head start on Woman in White for the November group read.

Hasn't been a very good 1001 month, but I did read A Farewell to Arms and Malone Dies. I have five Beckett's left on the list and I will be waiting a long time to get to any more. I've made marginal progress on them, but I am determined to finish it in November - especially since I think I have reached my renewal limit at the library.

I'm reading and enjoying Middlesex.

Since I last posted, I finished Dead Babies and started both Middlemarch and The Lost Language of Cranes. Oddly enough, last night there was a passing reference to the former in the latter. And the reference was to something that I'm sure is just ahead of where I am in Middlemarch. Funny coincidence.

I finished Jacques the Fatalist and Nana, both good reads with 4 stars.
I'll try and finish the terrible Delta of Venus before November to be done with it forever.
Don Quixote (now mainly on audio) is a delight! I am almost through book 1 now and dreading book 2 a bit which I always heard was much weaker.

Having zipped through A Void much quicker than expected I thought I'd peruse my shelves for a short read to squeeze in before the next Powell installment arrives. Imagine my surprise to find a shiny copy of Things Fall Apart with no recollection of how it got there! So this will be my final read of October.

#50 Just to give you hope I actually thought the second volume of Don Quixote was stronger than the first! The second volume basically provided the framework for the modern novel, I'm led to understand and the elements of meta-fiction are years before it's time!

#50 & #53, agreed, volume 2 of DQ is totally interesting. It is also a little unnerving. You have to deal with the quite cruel sense of humor of the 17th-century Spanish elite. It came as a bit of a shock to me, but once I'd adjusted to it, I understood Velazquez's paintings of dwarves much better.

#53 and 54: Thank you both!! Now I can't wait to get there. 6 chapters left in part 1. :-)

I'm halfway through The home and the world. It's a book that 'speaks' to me, by which I mean some of the characters express my thoughts better than I could.

Kafka on the Shore for me. I really like Murakami.

#56. I felt the same way when I read The home and the world. I kept high lighting passages such as:
"So long as we are impervious to truth and have to be moved by some hypnotic stimulus, we must know that we lack the capacity for self-government." - as true today as it was in 1916 India.

"...for love is a vagabond who makes his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal jar kept in the drawing room." Some of Tagore's writing reads like poetry.

Just finished Nostromo and still reading The Female Quixote.

Finished up October's short-books with The Gathering, The Judge and His Hangman, The Lost Steps, and Claudine's House.